cover story - Joe Bonamassa

The Ballad of John Henry has a real depth to
it, not just in the playing but in the singing too.
What do you attribute that to?
I went through some personal problems
this year at home, and this record is more
autobiographical than my past work, which
I think is a good thing. I’ve always been shy
about exposing too much of my own life on
albums. This time, I just threw that out the
window and wrote about true events. I used
to get really indignant as a kid when people
would say that I was too young to play the
blues. I’d say, “No I’m not! My heart’s been
broken too!” But now, at 31, after having
gone through some more years of living, I
know that there’s a sound that comes from
experience, from being in the world a little
bit. Hopefully I’ll sound even deeper when
I’m 51. We’ll see.
How did you create the tone that opens the
record on the title track?
That was my live rig: a Marshall Silver
Jubilee, a Category 5 Super Lead-type of amp,
a Two-Rock, and a Carol Ann JB-100, which
is basically a big clean amp. We set up a couple
of room mics, four mics on the amps, and
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I just hit a big dropped-DDchord with a wah
pedal and a Fulltone tremolo. The main
rhythm tone is an Ernie Ball John Petrucci
baritone. It’s a strange choice for my style of
playing, but these are fantastic guitars. I think
people tune them down to B with lighter
strings, but we tune them to C and put heavy
strings on them and they sound fantastic. It’s
almost like a Danelectro tone.
When the Dobro comes in at 0:45, there’s a
spooky little part that sounds like harmonics.
That’s rhythm guitar underneath the
Dobro. Kevin grabs bits and pieces from different
takes and he does a lot of this stuff
without telling me. He puts these little textures
in the songs. He might take something
from the end of the song and put it in the
verse. It’s not necessarily something I played
right in that spot. We talk about this a lot.
We make records for people who buy songs
off of iTunes, but we also make records for
the audiophiles, who buy them on vinyl and
spin them on really expensive systems with
$2,000 headphones. We make sure we put
in these little interesting things underneath
what you’ll hear on computer speakers.
Joe Bonamassa COVER STORY
Your slide solo in “The Ballad of John Henry”
takes the song to an all-new place. How did that
come together? Are you in standard tuning?
It’s standard, but down two full-steps to
C. Tom Dowd used to tell me that I would
cheat because I play slide in open tunings.
Over the years I’ve forced myself to play more
in standard. When we cut that lead, I was
just going to play a regular solo, but then I
happened to see a slide sitting on a music
stand. I grabbed it and went for it, and I think
it has a cooler texture than if I had just done
my normal blazing over the top of it. That’s
the cool thing about how we record. We do
most of it live, and you’re reacting the way
you would in a gig situation. It feels more
like you’re playing in a venue than a studio,
which is good.
Your lead tone on “Jockey Full of Bourbon”
sounds like it has a lot of room on it. Is that the
same rig?
No. I had a bunch of my old amps in my
folks’ basement—probably 15 or so: my
blond Bassman, a blond Tremolux, old
Vibroluxes, etc. We shipped them out to California
and I started setting them up. The
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